While arguable mrgybe, from what I understand, there are more Democrats registered to vote than Republicans, Independents or any other national parties. That is clearly the case in California.

Since the time of President Reagan, the Republicans want you to believe that they speak for, and represent the majority of Americans. One only has to listen to House Speaker Boehner, Senate Minority Leader McConnell, or candidate Romney to find they still pander the same illusion to the nation today. They also erroneously believe that they are more patriotic Americans. Even if I'm wrong about Democrats being a majority, I think that we can agree that margins are slim at best. Looking down your nose at half of the population of this country and insinuating that they are ruining this country is hardly a valid or an admirable position.

Would you ever vote for a Democrat? Although it seems very doubtful from your more recent commentary, it could still be possible. Based on your earlier comments regarding Senator Webb of Virginia, I would guess that you supported him in 2006. Also, if a Democratic candidate was hugely supportive of the oil industry, and pursuing vastly increased oil drilling and processing, I think that they could garner your vote.

Regarding the upcoming presidential election in November, I think you will be playing your Romney card, if one was to believe what you've said so far.

Going out on a limb here with this crowd to say I support vastly increased oil drilling and production. We need to cut our dependence on Arab oil. At least until a suitable alternative is found._________________#Arrest44

From the New Yorker on increasing the rate of combustion of carbon fuels:

Quote:

The relationship between carbon emissions and the earth’s temperature has been clear for more than a century: in 1908, the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius suggested that burning fossil fuels might help prevent the coming ice age. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson received a report from his Science Advisory Committee, titled “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment,” that noted for the first time the potential need to balance increased greenhouse-gas emissions by “raising the albedo, or the reflectivity, of the earth.” The report suggested that such a change could be achieved by spreading small reflective particles over large parts of the ocean.

While such tactics could clearly fail, perhaps the greater concern is what might happen if they succeeded in ways nobody had envisioned. Injecting sulfur dioxide, or particles that perform a similar function, would rapidly lower the temperature of the earth, at relatively little expense—most estimates put the cost at less than ten billion dollars a year. But it would do nothing to halt ocean acidification, which threatens to destroy coral reefs and wipe out an enormous number of aquatic species. The risks of reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the atmosphere on that scale would be as obvious—and immediate—as the benefits. If such a program were suddenly to fall apart, the earth would be subjected to extremely rapid warming, with nothing to stop it. And while such an effort would cool the globe, it might do so in ways that disrupt the behavior of the Asian and African monsoons, which provide the water that billions of people need to drink and to grow their food.

“Geoengineering” actually refers to two distinct ideas about how to cool the planet. The first, solar-radiation management, focusses on reducing the impact of the sun. Whether by seeding clouds, spreading giant mirrors in the desert, or injecting sulfates into the stratosphere, most such plans seek to replicate the effects of eruptions like Mt. Pinatubo’s. The other approach is less risky, and involves removing carbon directly from the atmosphere and burying it in vast ocean storage beds or deep inside the earth. But without a significant technological advance such projects will be expensive and may take many years to have any significant effect.

There are dozens of versions of each scheme, and they range from plausible to absurd. There have been proposals to send mirrors, sunshades, and parasols into space. Recently, the scientific entrepreneur Nathan Myhrvold, whose company Intellectual Ventures has invested in several geoengineering ideas, said that we could cool the earth by stirring the seas. He has proposed deploying a million plastic tubes, each about a hundred metres long, to roil the water, which would help it trap more CO2. “The ocean is this giant heat sink,’’ he told me. “But it is very cold. The bottom is nearly freezing. If you just stirred the ocean more, you could absorb the excess CO2 and keep the planet cold.” (This is not as crazy as it sounds. In the center of the ocean, wind-driven currents bring fresh water to the surface, so stirring the ocean could transform it into a well-organized storage depot. The new water would absorb more carbon while the old water carried the carbon it has already captured into the deep.)

The Harvard physicist Russell Seitz wants to create what amounts to a giant oceanic bubble bath: bubbles trap air, which brightens them enough to reflect sunlight away from the surface of the earth. Another tactic would require maintaining a fine spray of seawater—the world’s biggest fountain—which would mix with salt to help clouds block sunlight.

The best solution, nearly all scientists agree, would be the simplest: stop burning fossil fuels, which would reduce the amount of carbon we dump into the atmosphere. That fact has been emphasized in virtually every study that addresses the potential effect of climate change on the earth—and there have been many—but none have had a discernible impact on human behavior or government policy. Some climate scientists believe we can accommodate an atmosphere with concentrations of carbon dioxide that are twice the levels of the preindustrial era—about five hundred and fifty parts per million. Others have long claimed that global warming would become dangerous when atmospheric concentrations of carbon rose above three hundred and fifty parts per million. We passed that number years ago. After a decline in 2009, which coincided with the harsh global recession, carbon emissions soared by six per cent in 2010—the largest increase ever recorded. On average, in the past decade, fossil-fuel emissions grew at about three times the rate of growth in the nineteen-nineties.

Although the I.P.C.C., along with scores of other scientific bodies, has declared that the warming of the earth is unequivocal, few countries have demonstrated the political will required to act—perhaps least of all the United States, which consumes more energy than any nation other than China, and, last year, more than it ever had before. The Obama Administration has failed to pass any meaningful climate legislation. Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, has yet to settle on a clear position. Last year, he said he believed the world was getting warmer—and humans were a cause. By October, he had retreated. “My view is that we don’t know what is causing climate change on this planet,” he said, adding that spending huge sums to try to reduce CO2 emissions “is not the right course for us.” China, which became the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases several years ago, constructs a new coal-burning power plant nearly every week. With each passing year, goals become exponentially harder to reach, and global reductions along the lines suggested by the I.P.C.C. seem more like a “pious wish,” to use the words of the Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen, who in 1995 received a Nobel Prize for his work on ozone depletion.

“Most nations now recognize the need to shift to a low-carbon economy, and nothing should divert us from the main priority of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions,’’ Lord Rees of Ludlow wrote in his 2009 forward to a highly influential report on geoengineering released by the Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of sciences. “But if such reductions achieve too little, too late, there will surely be pressure to consider a ‘plan B’—to seek ways to counteract climatic effects of green-house gas emissions.’’

While arguable mrgybe, from what I understand, there are more Democrats registered to vote than Republicans, Independents or any other national parties. That is clearly the case in California.

That can't be true. The Republicans are to blame for the California budget chaos. An expert told us.

swchandler wrote:

Looking down your nose at half of the population of this country and insinuating that they are ruining this country is hardly a valid or an admirable position.

I completely agree. You should really stop doing that.

swchandler wrote:

Would you ever vote for a Democrat? Although it seems very doubtful from your more recent commentary, it could still be possible. Based on your earlier comments regarding Senator Webb of Virginia, I would guess that you supported him in 2006.

And Mark Warner, the other Virginia Senator. Unlike you I vote for the best candidate.

swchandler wrote:

Also, if a Democratic candidate was hugely supportive of the oil industry, and pursuing vastly increased oil drilling and processing, I think that they could garner your vote.

Absolutely he/ they would..........but it might be difficult getting to the polls with all those pigs flying around.

California is not alone in underfunded public pension plans. The Pew Center calculates the total unfunded public pension liabilities at $1.25 Trillion (almost a third of the total obligation).

Colorado's public pension system is in worse condition than California's. And, Colorado is not a particularily high tax, high spending state. FWIW, Texas does not fare that well either. Interesting chart here...

It seems that the pension problems may not be, necessarily, tied to the other fiscal aspects of an individual state.

Lets get positive OK? An event is happening in the bay area today that is fairly incredible. A young genius moved to Palo Alto a few years back , and today there are 100 Billion reasons why california's decline is greatly exaggerated.

It's also an insufferable, extremely overbearing nanny state, as I've established before. I will never, ever, forget or forgive being told I must pay $76 to enter a state park for 20 minutes or having a state trooper demand that I move on NOW after I pulled onto a gravel turnout to eat the freaking sandwich the park wanted to charge me $76 to eat. "You can not stop here because there's no sign saying you can stop here" is probably the most anti-Constitutional statement I have ever heard. And paying bums $400 a month to $#!+ in San Francisco streets is beyond insane.

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